AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE PRIOR ECONOMIC EXPERIENCE OF PRIMARY EDUCATION STUDENTS

This paper summarises the findings of an analysis of primary education students’ backgrounds and economic experiences, relating this to their economic and industrial understanding. The research was conducted in the 1990‐91 period by the Primary Schools and Industry Centre of the Polytechnic of North London, under the sponsorship and aegis of E ATE. The project team consisted of the present writer with Merryn Hutchings (PNL) and John Ahier (Homerton College). The full research report is published by EATE as The Economic and Industrial background, understanding and attitudes of Student Primary Teachers: EATE Research Report No. 1.     

Opportunity costs associated with the provision of student services: a case study of web-based lecture technology

Universities aim to provide services that are not only beneficial to students but also efficient relative to possible alternative services. Using opportunity cost, this study considers staff and student perceptions of the usefulness and valuation of web-based lecture technology (WBLT). It reveals that a quarter of students did not use WBLT while many staff members thought WBLT had a negative impact on their face-to-face teaching. Further, over a third of students sampled said they would not be affected if WBLT were not made available and many staff members felt constrained by WBLT technology. Some staff members spent a lot of time preparing WBLT while others eschewed the technology altogether. Nevertheless, a relatively small number of students place enormous value on WBLT, as do some staff, even if only simple audio of lectures are provided. The academic policy implications of this study suggest that university provision of WBLT could take into account the opportunity cost of WBLT use as a valuation-basis, possibly recovering costs through extra fees. This would allow for improved decision-making by university administrators and facilitate a move towards a useful measurement basis of WBLT. A wider academic policy implication is to consider whether all universities should produce and deliver WBLT at all and to what extent it should encourage staff to develop enhanced WBLT. Provision of sophisticated WBLT or any other service for students bears an opportunity cost in terms of less preparation by staff for face-to-face lessons or other effective teaching or research.     

Effects of school‐wide positive behavior support on teacher self‐efficacy

This study examined the relationships between implementation of a school‐wide approach to behavior, School‐wide Positive Behavior Support (SWPBS), and teacher self‐efficacy. Twenty‐two teachers from schools implementing SWPBS and 40 teachers from schools not implementing SWPBS completed a questionnaire measuring aspects of self‐efficacy. Differences in ratings of self‐efficacy were examined using multilevel modeling. Results showed that teachers at SWPBS schools reported significantly higher perceptions of teacher self‐efficacy when controlling for school‐level effects. Results are discussed in terms of implications for future research and practice. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Assessing efficiency–effectiveness tradeoffs in multi-stage retrieval systems without using relevance judgments

Large-scale retrieval systems are often implemented as a cascading sequence of phases—a first filtering step, in which a large set of candidate documents are extracted using a simple technique such as Boolean matching and/or static document scores; and then one or more ranking steps, in which the pool of documents retrieved by the filter is scored more precisely using dozens or perhaps hundreds of different features. The documents returned to the user are then taken from the head of the final ranked list. Here we examine methods for measuring the quality of filtering and preliminary ranking stages, and show how to use these measurements to tune the overall performance of the system. Standard top-weighted metrics used for overall system evaluation are not appropriate for assessing filtering stages, since the output is a set of documents, rather than an ordered sequence of documents. Instead, we use an approach in which a quality score is computed based on the discrepancy between filtered and full evaluation. Unlike previous approaches, our methods do not require relevance judgments, and thus can be used with virtually any query set. We show that this quality score directly correlates with actual differences in measured effectiveness when relevance judgments are available. Since the quality score does not require relevance judgments, it can be used to identify queries that perform particularly poorly for a given filter. Using these methods, we explore a wide range of filtering options using thousands of queries, categorize the relative merits of the different approaches, and identify useful parameter combinations.